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6 Comments

The six principles of lifestyle businesses

submitted this link on March 25, 2021
  1. 8

    You price your product at $300/month. You're making $70k a year and have 20 customers.

    This is the most important point in the article imo. Charge more.

    It's ridiculously difficult to find or support hundreds or thousands of customers as an indie hacker. Most of the breakout success stories involve founders finding fewer customers, not more, but simply charging higher prices.

    If you think of the following equation: NumberOfCustomers × Price = Revenue, which of these numbers is the easiest to change? Price, by a long shot.

    1. 1

      I've heard you encourage so many indie hackers to charge more. Surely you have custom T-shirts with "Charge More" on the front by now 😉

    2. 1

      Love the equation framing! And thanks for the reminder, time to do some pricing A/B tests...

  2. 1

    Thanks for sharing this article, love the simple/auto pilot point—lifestyle freedom is what matters in a lifestyle business!

    While I read it I found myself asking myself “great lifestyle business... for who? What does ‘great’ even mean?” I found that the article, and most indie hacker content out there, leans towards B2B SaaS being the way to do build a successful bootstrapped company. And I understand that these are more so guidelines, and yes B2B SaaS may be objectively “great” from a business or investor’s perspective because of high price points and margin, subscription revenue, etc. But I think the “subjective” founder perspective and experience matters too—the most IMO, otherwise what’s the point of doing anything in life? And while some founders like B2B, a lot of other founders gravitate towards helping individuals instead of businesses, or even offer (gasp) non-recurring pricing, and have built great lifestyle businesses.

    Haha I guess that went from sharing my reflections about the article to a bit of a rant.

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